Erasure, flux, translations, terraforming
Inquiring the representation of Topos in a territorial project entails both sequences of spatiality and temporality, as it appears through the processes that form-, and erase land. Implicit motions, laterally and longitudinally, shape the multitude of perceptions and sensations of the landscape, observed through the lens of natural processes of sedimentation and erosion versus anthropogenic disturbance events interfering within them. Complex volumes of soil, sole manifestations of past fluidity of marine- and riverine territory through the fixation of sediment, show the ever moving suspension of soil in water. Iterating onto itself through the duality of the formation and degradation processes, creating past, present and future. Now, within the anthropogenic territory, tension appears through the formation of fields, structures and objects of an infrastructural nature. These rigid remnants of civilization, anchoring human activity onto the territory, unable to achieve the state of fluidity as demanded by the rapidly changing environmental conditions and processes encroaching upon us. Physical barriers are formed to actively destabilize and manipulate natural processes on the long- and short term, in order to create an engineered system of transposition without translation and migration. The mutual engagement of water and sand particles, once the core of terraforming and erasure, diminished to the sheer exchange of anthropogenic pollutants and materials within a rigid field of an ever growing gap between the human and natural territory. Infrastructure will, throughout the climactic zones, across the globe, lead to destabilization of our contemporary representation of Topos on either the short term through shock, or the long term through stressors on the environmental layer. Infrastructure, our vertical alignment with the soil, anchoring humanity, disabling horizontal movement of mankind.